Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!keele!nott-cs!mips!cczdao
From: cczdao@mips.nott.ac.uk (David Osborne)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mips
Subject: Re: Setting timezone in sendmail 5.61
Summary: source hacking not required
Message-ID: <1991Mar14.123437.12239@cs.nott.ac.uk>
Date: 14 Mar 91 12:34:37 GMT
References: <1991Mar7.092840.13878@cs.nott.ac.uk> <344@ptcburp.ptcbu.oz.au>
Sender: news@cs.nott.ac.uk
Organization: Cripps Computing Centre, University of Nottingham, UK
Lines: 23

In article <344@ptcburp.ptcbu.oz.au> michi@ptcburp.ptcbu.oz.au (Michael Henning) writes,
(following up my enquiry)
>>Our /etc/TZ file is set up correctly.  Is there anything else which
>>should be set to make sendmail use the GMT timezone?
>
>Sendmail explicitely unsets the environment variable TZ, and in most
>implementations I have seen, the Ot option is ignored. The best way to fix
>it is to hack the source. This means that your users can claim to have sent
>their mail at a different time than they actually sent it, by setting TZ,
>but I don't believe that this is a problem for most installations.

Nothing that drastic was required (though I do have the 5.61 sources).

Someone, whose name I have lost, suggested the solution, and that
was to use zic to set up the default timezone using the zoneinfo
package.  That not only cured the timezone problem for sendmail,
but also the kernel logging to syslogd, which was also running under
the belief it was in the PST zone.

Simply saying "zic -d GMT" fixed things.
I like easy solutions like that!

--dave